We typically hear songs and albums only upon their completion, when the artists and producers have finished their work and let us experience exactly what they want us to.

That’s appropriate and proper. In the end, it doesn’t matter that a roadie who happened to be a trained pianist but hadn’t bothered to tell anyone came up with the keyboard parts in Lynyrd Skynyrd’s “Free Bird.” What matters is the final product.

But it sure is interesting. As is “Muscle Shoals,” Greg “Freddy” Camalier’s documentary about the tiny town in Alabama that has produced an enormous amount of great music, including seminal tracks by Aretha Franklin, Percy Sledge, Wilson Pickett, the Rolling Stones and, yes, Lynyrd Skynyrd.

The movie is more a collection of cool people telling great stories than it is a structured documentary (despite Camalier’s attempts in that direction). But in this case, that’s enough.

We hear from Mick Jagger, Keith Richards, Franklin, Pickett and more (including U2’s Bono, who hasn’t recorded in the city but is always a go-to interview in a talking-head documentary, balancing the line between poetic and pretentious, occasionally falling into the latter category but forging ahead anyway).

The town sits beside the Tennessee River, which Camalier (and Bono) credit with some of the magic of the place. A dirt-poor local named Rick Hall opened FAME (Florence Alabama Music Enterprises) Studios in the 1950s, hired a house band (which would come to be known as the Swampers and be name-checked in Skynyrd’s “Sweet Home Alabama”) and was soon cutting records.

Hall talks about the business in a matter-of-fact manner as he recalls thinking every single could be his last if it wasn’t a hit. Luckily for him, most were. It started with Sledge, trembling because he was so nervous, belting out “When a Man Loves a Woman,” which Hall played for Jerry Wexler, the legendary head of Atlantic Records. The sound — and the Swampers — was so idiosyncratically rich that soon producers and labels were sending singers down to Muscle Shoals to get it, where they would find a surprise.

Hall and the Swampers are White, yet they are responsible for some of the deepest grooves in music. (There is a funny story about Paul Simon wanting to record with “those same Black players that played on ‘I’ll Take You There.’ ” Al Bell, a songwriter and producer, who wrote the song, said, “That can happen, except these guys are mighty pale.”)

Race plays a role in the story, of course. Although Hall and the artists say there was never any problem in the studio, that wasn’t always true outside its walls. One musician talks about how if you hung around with Black musicians, you got stares. If you hung around with Duane Allman, with his hippie looks, you got worse. (Though their outsider status in town did evidently lead to Allman convincing Pickett to cover “Hey Jude,” which one observer calls the birth of Southern rock.)

Eventually the Swampers set out on their own, establishing Muscle Shoals Sound, a rival studio. Hall felt betrayed and abandoned, continuing issues in his life, which he discusses. But the magic and the music kept coming from both places. The catalog is astounding (and the soundtrack terrific).

Leave it to Keith Richards, smoke in hand, drink on the table, to sum it up: Making records makes you immortal, he says, because it’s all there in the grooves. “Muscle Shoals” certainly makes a convincing case.

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